You may or may not notice that all of the entry titles on the site have been updated. Instead of standard HTML, they’re now rendered in Flash. Yep, every time I make a new post, I open up Flash, edit a title object, and save it as a SWF. Oh, and I do it three times - one for each style.
No I don’t.
I stumbled across a technique this afternoon called Inman Flash Replacement. You may have seen it used over at ESPN.com. You’ll probably see it at more sites in the future.
What it boils down to is an ingenious way to replace text on a page with a stylized version, while leaving the semantic structure of the page intact. It consists of 3 pieces: a rendered SWF file, a block of JavaScript, and the content. The JavaScript is called as the page loads. More or less, it scans the page for a defined tag (in my case, H2), reads the content within that tag, passes that content to the SWF file, and replaces the text with the SWF output.
It’s similar in nature to Fahrner Image Replacement, or FIR. That technique uses CSS to to replace text with images. While FIR doesn’t have the problem of compatibility - no plugins neccessary[1] - it can be time-consuming to create graphics and edit style sheets to create the desired effect. One advantage behind IFR is its ability to “play well” with dynamic sites: just pass the text to the SWF, and it does the work for you. That advantage can also be viewed as a disadvantage - you’re limited to templating the output. Great for larger, dynamic sites, not so great for smaller, static ones.
Like I said, I just stumbled across it this afternoon. I’m barely scratching the surface of what can be done. When I get some free time (Ha!), I’ll start brainstorming…
fn1. Here’s another great thing about the IFR technique: if the user doesn’t have the flash plug-in, or has JavaScript turned off, the page is rendered using whatever rules are set in your style sheet. Just create a style that approximates the SWF output, and it degrades quite nicely.
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